By using this website, you consent to our use of cookies. For more information on cookies see our Cookie Policy.

Hennessy New Irish Writing: August 2017’s joint winning poems

The Disappeared and Sand Mandala by James Conor Patterson

Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 06:00

James Patterson

James Conor Patterson

The Disappeared

Even now I find it difficult to imagine being a campesino. Dicing sweet potato over the kitchen-sink. My hands calloused from years of raising sugarcane & lemon. What could possibly be to such a life? Argentina is tending more important matters. I run guns through the Monteros for Santucho; in January, shoot down a transport plane and kill thirteen. I’m not sorry. Perón is not in power, so civility can rise again in the green-cut mountains of Tucamán like Christ removing Lazarus’s shroud- the sun shimmering off La Angostura, the blue & white of the flag in cloudless sky.

*

And with these things when they come, they wrap me like a present. Sometime close to dawn, with an oil-rag in my mouth and a bloodstained pillowcase wrapped around my head, I’m thrown from a helicopter into the South Atlantic and sent to greet the fish. The last thing I hear is traitor, or its equivalent. I have no frame of reference. The ocean- current carries me over thousands of miles and when I’m disturbed again, I’m something else entirely. A rumour in the sand perhaps, or a ghost without pasture. Someone who might be a shell or a fossil, foundations on an unfinished house, or four converged headlamps on a quiet country road.

Sand Mandala

Not flesh as back to dust, but dust itself made flesh by the myriad scrapings of men, the sand mandala took shape that morning in front of a crowd who’d stopped to watch the monks at work – their bodies stooped over a large clean slate, outlining gods with T-squares, rulers, French curves & compasses – a thing, I knew, would take weeks to finish and longer again to forget the memory of. So once it had started, its progress seemed all there was, and I checked daily to see the image grow– the Kalachakra in granules of crushed stone, scraped from the chak-pur for each dyed figure– until the day when the monks removed it and took the sand in a silk-wrapped urn to the sea. Whereupon, you & I, my love – two particles shook from the residue of a dead picture – were dropped by the wind into our own fresh masterwork.

James Conor Patterson is from Newry, Co Down. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magma, Morning Star, The Moth, New Welsh Review, New Statesman, Poetry Ireland Review, The Tangerine and The Stinging Fly. In 2015 he read as part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions series and in 2013 he received the iYeats ‘Emerging Talent’ Award for poetry. He has been highly commended for the Patrick Kavanagh Award, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and longlisted for the Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition